Rating: 3/5, average
This one I read with the local book club. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up otherwise, and I might have even skipped it if I didn’t know it was by a woman writer with a PhD in Chemical Physics. The cover on Amazon looks really cheesy, but the writing isn’t too bad.
Lightning Strike is about a girl with Mayan ancestry who meets an alien late at night on the way back from her shift at the bar. They strike up a quick, passionate, and playful romance. Their dynamic reminded me a little bit of Inuyasha. Althor is a little hot-headed, simple, and very protective of Tina. He’s not a bad imaginary boyfriend—he’d probably appeal to Twilight fans as well, since he has that quality of knowing where the heroine is and if she’s in trouble at all times.
Tina is struggling hard when she meets Althor, trying to save up enough money to go to school and study physics. Her father left their family when she was young, and she was raised by her mother and her older brother. Her older brother was killed in a gang conflict, so now she’s mostly on her own. She’s still getting harassed by the man who killed her brother, and Althor defends her from him, which is how he earns her trust. This story takes on some heavy themes for a light scifi/romance, with themes of sexual assault, single-mother families, gang strife, and racial inequality.
This book was originally published in 1997 and it does come off a little dated in its slang and cultural references. This first installment in the Skolian Saga is a lot of background for the series to come. There’s a little plot, but it’s mostly introducing the characters, setting up relationships, and worldbuilding.
Something that’s a little strange is that Tina is seventeen, but she doesn’t disclose this to Althor until after they have sex… he gets upset about it because apparently it’s not allowed on his planet, but Tina doesn’t care. I’m not sure what the author was trying to do with this? Maybe she’s trying to challenge the idea of statutory rape, because Tina was giving enthusiastic consent? But why would you want to do that as a woman, since the rules against statutory rape protect girls from being taken advantage of by older men? It’s sketchy.
There are a lot of technological innovations, but none of them really interested me that much… radio, internet, space travel, etc. A lot of time is spent on Althor and Tina’s empathy/telepathy—they can speak to each other in their minds and communicate with the spaceship. The more I encounter empathy as a superpower in science fiction, the funnier it is to me… empathy is something all people should possess, the fact that a lot of scifi writers like to make it a superpower says a lot.
I wasn’t a huge fan of this book and I won’t be continuing the series, but on the other hand it wasn’t terrible. I thought some of Althor and Tina’s banter was funny and their relationship was simple and sweet. I was not terribly interested in the scientific aspects of this novel, which was a little disappointing, though maybe someone with more scientific background would find it more engaging. The fact that the protagonist was Latina was more interesting to me, but I can’t comment on how accurate it is to the Latina experience since I’m not Latina. It seems like good representation, though, especially for the 1990s, and other than Axiom’s End, I haven’t read any scifi novels with Latin characters… I should probably fix that… I have Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties on my shelf. 😊
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